KaseyKillface

You're grey-eyed and grinning in the doorway, lips cold and capillary-blue, and I'm waiting for some signal to move, pressed between pages, preserved. Your hand rests upon the light-switch, but the glow of morning betrays you, the clumsy flushed fingers of dawn pushing through layers of winter coat to expose the deep red tulips blooming though your shirt. You're wearing your bullet-hole like a boutonniere, baby, like you're expecting me to laugh, like you're hoping I'll take it as a joke. And in my mind, I can feel my ribs snapping like wishbones on so many Thanksgiving turkeys. My skin's unraveling, teeth falling out throu

I am the river's son, my arteries flowing turquoise and turning to rapids rushing around my frame, filling me with this sense of buoyancy, minnows tickling my sternum. I am the river's son. My palms caress each silty shoreline, every battered bank and bend, and these places I know so well become me as my fingerprint, even the bridge above me inflamed by the afternoon sun-glow, burning rusty and blood-orange against the steel blue sky. I am the river's son; I bring my home along like hermit crab, where I step I pull water from the earth.

Okay. It's a party, somewhere downtown, you're just staring at your shoes- but your gaze moves and drifting nimbus-like into your view are these beautiful eyes, like a sunrise, like a hundred monarch butterflies some hint of sunlight on a Sunday night- you're falling. Oh come on, I know you've been there- brain waves turn to static; brain's an empty attic. You can't think of anything clever so most times you just mutter or you stutter something like "wh-whatever," feigning apathy, causing your vocabulary's atrophy. You're not charming, it's alarming- your heart is beating through your ears. If you could just think of o

In my fevered dreams I couldn't breathe. Thin fingers wrapped around my neck, but they became like spidery veins, the roots of something green growing inside, starting at my lungs, wrapped around my esophagus like a weed, feeding off of my breath. The plant grew and grew, and bloomed soft petals from my lips, blossoms of honeysuckle that made my exhalations sweet and my voice beautiful. And I dissolved into a different dream, where the yellow scent of blooming daffodils was overwhelming; the perfume made us dizzy and drunk with feeling as we walked in the arboretum with the turtles and catfish that flew around o

I am    deception, a sheep in wolf's clothing. and so far the meek have inherited nothing. Stop   this vulgar bark,   your bite never piercing.    I know everything you'll say.    You never dare to live.  .  I am always thinking,   my brain always humming:    "....the sheer guts and    the bloody-minded determination..."  I feel as if I am not speaking,     not breathing, either as if the bronchi are         frozen in barbaric ice         like these city streets.  I stay at home not doing      anything.  The world is all like     bits, pieces coming up     shattered mirror,     seven years mo

The child watches the hummingbirds gathered around the feeder. Glinting green creatures hang in the air. They send vibrations like tuning forks from invisible wings. She thinks their stomachs must be filled with helium. They float like peacock-colored balloons in the wind, tiny alien dirigibles. The impossible-seeming physics of it, like light as both particle and wave are to a brand-new mind indistinguishable from magic. When does the natural world lose that awe-inspiring glory? When do we become complacent with hummingbirds? More closely watch the child's eyes shining like silver nitrate, alive and illuminated, incandes

Each day with you is precious and stolen, a firefly I collect in the mason jar between spine and sternum locked between my ribs, housing moments preserved like fall leaves pressed between pages, passionate red and yellow staining parchment . I keep this collection of memories to remember you in the months to come where we are separated by cities, stoplights and highway hypnosis, so I can still recall you and I in the arboretum, the golden scent of daffodils making us dizzy and drunk with feeling, as we count the catfish in the toad-belly-green pond and talk about a future where we live in a little house with a

The thing is, I lose everything. I've     misplaced     all the things I own at least twice. No thing is safe from disappearing, it all slips between the threads rough stitched fabric of my universe. A few weeks ago, a pair of rose colored rabbit-shaped earrings went missing. They must have scampered away from my bedside table as I slept. and yesterday too my class ring, with dragon insignia carved into its metal side, lost so many times I've just stopped looking. It always turns up again  like a hungry cat. Long ago I bid farewell to a book of poetry by Billy Collins, each page dressed in a suit of marginalia

I came upon a congregation of trees, their foliage illuminated into verdant halos by the sunset sky of atomic tangerine, and sat for a while to watch their swaying celebration, the dance of the forest. Aware of my own limbs, inelegant as ginger roots, I offered up a prayer: let my phalanges bloom at the tips, my cartridge unravel into moss, my spine stretch into a single, solid trunk, my hair become prickly spikes of pine- for I would be united with the whole wood growing in regal and deliberate lentissimo, one column in a cathedral for foxes, one more shining cedar stretching its fingers upward in praise of the heavens fr

Every day she still dons a dress of asphalt & a string of pearls shining like wolves teeth, though she sees only bones and butterflies behind her skin, nervous wings fluttering against the ivory of her skeleton. As she pulls up the silver spine of her black dress, her fingers tremble like hollow reeds in the wind. With mascara lashes sticky and dark, she gives butterfly kisses to the air, blinks back a memory and bites a flesh-red lip. She fights back the instinct to run and instead tightens sinews in her shoulders like the string of a bow. Today, she'll think she sees his face in the mask of a stranger on the subway and f